Jona: puppetry gone awry

Goodluck Ebele Jonathan, president of the Federal Republic, may well appear a tragic figure, trapped at the wrong time, and at the wrong juncture; the way he has handled the subsidy removal mess.

Yeah, he is a tragic figure, all right – for who would, in a spate of eight months, with a “pan-Nigeria” mandate in tow, squander his political capital, built on nothing but mere Goodluck emotions; fired by a regional conspiracy against a rival regional power bloc? But in the grand irony of illogicality, passion makes and passion unmakes. Then, the cheer was Goodluck! Goodluck! Now, the jeer is Badluck! Badluck! As the northern masses would say, and not without a tinge of irony, chikena!

Still, beyond the veneer of a pitiable president who spectacularly shot himself in the foot but wilfully deludes himself he is “courageous” (as official trumpeters parrot in the rarefied airs of Aso Rock), is the stark reality of puppetry gone awry.

Presidential anointing, in the political history of Nigeria, has been nothing but presidential racketeering. The power gods, whose antenna is becoming dulled with time and bloated rent, convoke, not unlike some satanic cardinals’ conclave, and anoint one of their own – no, a favourite and pliable stooge.

And, in the worst tradition of puppet and puppeteer, the gods queue behind their stooge, with his guaranteed executive cover, and go on with their gravy.

President Jonathan is the latest of such rigged presidential anointing made out as the popular choice. Nigerians always fall for such gambit only later to cry blue murder!If you doubt this theory, relive the advent of the Fourth Republic on 29 May 1999. The hassled, disoriented and fleeing military needed one of their own to cover their tracks and make their retreat less panicky. They picked on Olusegun Obasanjo. But Obasanjo played a fast one. He would serve no god but himself and the power gods had better go jump into the Atlantic or, better still, roast at the nearest desert! Looking for who best to push his new “I-philosophy” from the ancien regime’s “we, the power cabal”, he picked on noble-hearted but opportunistic and health-challenged Umaru Musa Yar’Adua. But with his Umoru on his death bed, Obasanjo jumped ship for a new puppet: Jona, disavowing the zoning policy that brought both himself and Yar’adua to power.For that singular betrayal, Obasanjo set two booby traps: the ire of a section of the North which felt cheated by the emerging power equation; and of course, the long running subsidy removal conundrum. Obasanjo had bolted from local refining of crude on the wings of “deregulation” of petroleum downstream, driven not by local refining but by fuel importation. It is ironic justice therefore that one booby trap: the northern ire, apparent from the fearful radicalisation of northern protesters, has come with vengeance to fuel the other: the subsidy removal, in the current distemper against the voodoo downstream deregulation policy. As it is turning out, the president with the highest educational label in Nigerian history appears the one with the least rigour in thinking. President Jonathan’s harvest of gaffes and medley of bad judgments bear proud testimony to this sad reality. On the other hand, like the tragic King Macbeth in the Shakespeare play of the same name, President Jonathan is beset by a coven of witches and wizards, who continue to give him Dutch courage, based on phantom assurances, against a grim reality that insists he must change tack, after an unforced error, to use that tennis term. It is all so reminiscent of how the three witches charmed Macbeth to bring on himself ruin and damnation.But what made a tearful president that, at Madalla, Suleija, united a grieving nation behind him to, barely 24 hours after, unite the same nation against himself in fury? Why did he lob at defenceless Nigerians his own version of Boko Haram bombs – simply because some Breton Woods witches decreed so? Lack of presidential rigour? Or plain sorcery as economic policy? The witches’ angle and the Macbeth parallel are rather bewitching. At the beginning for Macbeth were three witches who not only promised the valiant thane promotion, but also emergency throne. Those witches, with a ready ally in his evil wife, stuck to Macbeth till his doom.At the beginning too for President Jonathan were local power sorcerers. But these have since been joined by witches from Breton Woods – brilliant minds whose genius foreign neo-cons have conned with neo-liberal economic orthodoxy, which though dispenses pain, brooks no alternative.Edwin Kiagbodo Clark, you would recall, started the Jonathan for President racket: not because of competence or any especial merit but because it was time to junk a supposed northern quota for a Niger Delta one, just because Goodluck Jonathan had become accidental president.But when came the first wave of nationwide protests against a cruel anti-people policy, Pa Clark and his South-South Elders and Leaders only countered with an ethnic riposte: nothing must be done to rock the boat simply because their “son” was on the throne! When the protests would not abate, Pa Clark yelped in pain, insisting that even if there was subsidy, the beneficiaries of such subsidies were outside the South-South!A younger generation coven of ethno-political witches is beginning to parrot this parochial diversion, just to obfuscate the matter. Atedo Peterside, an otherwise respected professional who made his mark in Lagos, in a pro-subsidy removal cant on Channels TV, made the outlandish claim that the bulk of the so-called subsidy was consumed by the rich and middle class of Lagos! He even pushed “re-distributing” some of the subsidy “savings” to poorer northern states. Nice try, if you are dumb!But would that change the reality that subsidy removal would deepen poverty – poverty that knows no tribe or creed? Or would his pitch remove the nationwide anger against Jonathan?

Meanwhile, Breton Woods’s metropolitan witches, led by Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, finance minister, coordinating minister for the economy and former managing director of the World Bank, keep on pushing the line that suggests baiting the president to call the bluff of the people and stick to his “reforms”.

But so did the witches entice Macbeth with “concrete” assurances that no one born of woman would harm him; and that he would not be defeated until Birnam wood moved to Dunsinane. As it turned out, Macduff that killed Macbeth was born through caesarean section and technically was “not born of woman”. Birnam wood too “moved” to Dunsinane. In the final anti-Macbeth assault, rebel groups carrying cut tree boughs, marched on the doomed king, giving the illusion that the wood indeed moved! So long for concrete illusions!

President Jonathan has a clear choice: to depend on his witches’ counsel or think more rigorously. Even then, with the looming American predicted 2015 Armageddon, it is grim observation that those who trouble Nigeria, in Jona, like Ibrahim Babangida during the June 12 crisis, have dribbled themselves into a ditch. At their most pronounced hour of need, they have a feckless fellow who doesn’t know jack as to what to do!Indeed, it is tragic puppetry gone awry!